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In most of today's commercially available cone-beam CT scanners, the well known FDK method is used for solving the 3D reconstruction task. The computational complexity of this algorithm prohibits its use for many medical applications without hardware acceleration. The brand-new Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA) with its high level of parallelism is a cost-efficient processor for performing the FDK reconstruction according to the medical requirements. The programming scheme, however, is quite different to any standard personal computer hardware. In this paper, we present an innovative implementation of the most time-consuming parts of the FDK algorithm: filtering and back-projection. We also explain the required transformations to parallelize the algorithm for the CBEA. Our software framework allows to compute the filtering and back-projection in parallel, making it possible to do an on-the-fly-reconstruction. The achieved results demonstrate that a complete FDK reconstruction is computed with the CBEA in less than seven seconds for a standard clinical scenario. Given the fact that scan times are usually much higher, we conclude that reconstruction is finished right after the end of data acquisition. This enables us to present the reconstructed volume to the physician in real-time, immediately after the last projection image has been acquired by the scanning device.
Scherl et al. (Thu,) studied this question.